


It is fear that I left back close on the highway

by oftirnanog



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/F, Lydia meta, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-18
Updated: 2013-10-18
Packaged: 2017-12-29 18:07:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1008425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oftirnanog/pseuds/oftirnanog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia keeps her eyes glued to the road, chasing the horizon like it owes her something, like the one behind her doesn’t even exist. The clouds are settling like snow drifts, darkening faster than the sky they’re leaving behind and Lydia would’ve thought that she’d be done with darkness by now, but it’s somehow inviting, a quiet dimming that won’t ask anything of her. So she’ll take it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It is fear that I left back close on the highway

**Author's Note:**

> This is something I had intended to polish and actually finish, but, well, then I didn't. So have some allydia roadtrip fic, because otherwise it's just going to sit on my hard drive collecting dust.
> 
> Title from the song 'Don't Be Angry' by The Organ

The past few months cling to Lydia like humid air, reverberating around her like a thunderclap, like a banshee’s scream, and, well, doesn’t that just say it all? 

She ditches school on a leave of absence. Her grades are high enough, and she’s smart enough, to get away with it. She buys an old ’65 mustang convertible in teal, packs a bag of essentials, and digs a ripped-along-the-seams map out of the drawer in the kitchen that no one ever opens. 

Lydia climbs in the driver’s side, adjusts the rearview mirror and then her sunglasses. She almost doesn’t notice Allison slip into the passenger seat. She’s wearing a pair of aviators and a leather jacket over a cobalt blue sundress, duffel bag in her lap that probably contains even less than the one Lydia threw in the trunk. Allison’s brown ringlets bounce as she turns her head to look at Lydia, relentless and intractable.

Lydia arches one artfully shaped eyebrow, muscle memory tugging the expression into place, because it’s only a practiced expression if she keeps practicing, and she’s been practicing for years, so why stop now? She had control down to an art form by the time she was ten years old. Studied her reflection at seven, eight, nine years old, memorizing the pull and contraction of every facial muscle. The tension of a complacent smile, the stiffness of a glare, the tugging furrow of feigned confusion. Eagerness is not attractive. Don’t show that crease of intelligence in your forehead, around you mouth. Never let anyone see you cry. 

Peter Hale shattered her control like a seismic event under bone dry earth, cracking it into shards before scattering it like dust, the scent of wolfsbane cloying in her nose, sticking to the back of her throat like rancid honey. Like the dark of a storm that comes on so quickly you don’t notice until you’re right in the centre of it. And then after all that, she’d started losing time again, turning up at murder scenes like some kind of scavenging animal drawn to the scent of carrion. 

And Allison had been there this time, with the words I believe you on her tongue, so Lydia doesn’t say a word. Just turns the key in the ignition and backs out of the driveway, roof up but windows rolled all the way down, and heads east, because west only means water, and Lydia’s tired of trying to hold herself afloat.

*

They get on Route 50 even though the GPS on Allison’s phone keeps trying to get them off of it. Eventually Allison turns it off, pulls the map out of the glove compartment, points out a sign reading the distance to Ocean City, Maryland. The map winds up on the floor, tearing even more at the seams as it gets caught under Allison’s cowboy boots. 

The drive is silent all the way to Carson City, but for the rushing wind and spinning tires on the highway. Lydia keeps her eyes glued to the road, chasing the horizon like it owes her something, like the one behind her doesn’t even exist. The clouds are settling like snow drifts, darkening faster than the sky they’re leaving behind and Lydia would’ve thought that she’d be done with darkness by now, but it’s somehow inviting, a quiet dimming that won’t ask anything of her. So she’ll take it.

“They call this stretch through Nevada ‘The Loneliest Road’,” Lydia says as they pull into the city, lights glittering as they drive through town, Lydia half-expecting saloons and horses and men in cowboy hats and spurs. 

Allison turns from where she was watching her hand ride the wind and gives Lydia a long, considering look. “Good thing we’re driving it together then,” she says, and grabs the top rim of the window, leaning her head against her arm as she gazes out the window again.

* 

Utah looks like another planet, all sweeping arches and rising mesas of russet red earth and they wait until dark and then lie in the dust, tracing constellations, some that they both know, some that they teach each other, some that they invent and garnish with elaborate stories.

Then the red gives way to a darker coal, to rising mountains in Colorado, peaks tipped white as though the clouds had come to settle there and then, pierced, bled down the sides. They drive along twisting mountain roads that constantly bury themselves behind the bends, and if Lydia takes them too fast, too close to the edge sometimes, Allison doesn’t say a thing. She just chews steadily on her gum, ears popping with the rising and falling altitude, and keeps her nose buried in one of her Edith Wharton novels, the one with the beat up cover that Lydia hasn’t bothered to identify.

Colorado turns into Kansas turns into Missouri and it all bleeds together in a blur of cheap motels with identical rooms (and identical memories triggering identical nightmares), peppered with strange roadside attractions in all their glorious Americana normalcy. And Lydia keeps chasing the horizon like it owes her something, like it’s trying to escape despite her refusal to let it go. 

Lydia feels like she’s scattering parts of herself along the highway, shedding skins lined with fears that she never even knew she had. By the time they get to St. Louis, Allison has claimed a usual place for her feet on the dash and her hair is piled at the back of her head in a loosely tied bun, her shirt haphazardly buttoned, revealing the edges of her bra. Lydia has ditched her makeup entirely, is driving in bare feet and cutoff shorts, an old t-shirt draped over her thin frame. 

They wander through Forest Park and Lydia catches Allison staring at her as they walk. She slants her a coy smile, not-quite-rusty muscle memory tugging the expression into place, because she knows that look and she knows exactly what her hair looks like in this fading, sunset half-light. So she kisses Allison right there, willow branches brushing at the back of her neck, and Allison kisses her back like she’s been waiting for it the whole trip, maybe the whole year. Kisses her with an intensity Lydia didn’t even know was possible. And maybe they can decide that they’ll never go back, that west is never a direction in which they’ll have to travel. Maybe they can settle along the Atlantic; trade one coast for another.

*

She lets Allison take her apart, limb by limb, hands on her throat, her ribs, over her hips, lips pressed to the inside of her thighs, the thin skin of her wrists, the soft planes of her belly. More importantly she lets Allison put her back together. Smoothing the edges that chafe, arranging all the bits that don’t quite fit so the gaps aren’t so wide. And it’s almost like being whole again, assuming she’d ever been whole to begin with. 

*

Beacon Hills looks exactly the same as it always did when they roll back into it three weeks later. A little greener for the spring, but the same nonetheless.

Except that Allison’s hand is twined with Lydia’s, thumb swiping over the skin of her wrist in rhythmic assurance, and she’s wearing Lydia’s old t-shirt. They’ve put miles on the car and taken miles off their worries and ditched the worst of their insecurities somewhere on the desert road or in a cornfield. 

And for once Lydia thinks they might be okay.


End file.
